On the heels of the Wine 2.0 event last week (see Tom from Fermentation’s review post here), I have to say that I’m surprised (real surprised) when I also read last week:
In a recent study by Internet Retailer Magazine, Wine.com was ranked the #1 online wine store for the third consecutive year. The company ranked #13 in the food and drug category and #199 among all online retailers, based on 2006 annual web revenues.
“We just completed a survey of nearly 1,400 of our customers, and 96% said they’d recommend us to a friend,” said Mike Osborn, Wine.com Founder and VP of Merchandising. “That’s the most important metric to us, and that’s the reason we’re among the top 200 largest web retailers in the country.”
Wine.com is the #1 online wine retailer for the 3rd year in a row!? All of their customers are happy to refer Wine.com to a friend!? Interesting factoids for sure and here’s the rub: Wine.com exhibits zero, zip, zilch in the way of Web 2.0 technologies—no blog, no community, no RSS feeds, no nothing. Half-baked user reviews provide marginal value and limited interactivity. While perfectly contemporary as far as online commerce goes these days, Wine.com certainly hasn’t moved the needle in progressiveness and could just as easily be a site circa year 2000.
Unfortunately, when contemplating this lack of progressiveness through the filter of wine technologists, bloggers and such, this news of Wine.com being the leading retailer should really give anybody in our little jet stream reason for pause.
Why? Because while we’re busy sniffing our own exhaust thinking about how we’re changing the wine world while Twittering our tasting notes from a comfy spot at a wine bar, the reality is that outside of our own convergence of technology wherewithal coupled with wine passion, there’s still heaps of people that just buy wine online and don’t do anything else. This group of people is significantly smaller, it should be noted, than people that just simply buy wine at the store and don’t do anything online short of checking email.
Read Tom’s excerpt from the above mentioned post. Then, re-read it:
I think my only real interesting contribution to the second panel, of which I was a part, was pointing out that the wine 2.0 phenomenon may be no more complex than a new set of technologies by which wineries communicate their story and product line to consumers, something they’ve been doing with some success with different technology long before the Internet. This would be the less reverent view of the wine 2.0 phenomenon. The most reverent view of this thing we celebrated on Friday would be the view that Online Social networking around wine will change the way all Americans understand the beverage and lead to a startling democratization of the beverage that will lead laggards to the party in the dust.
Tom makes a very, very critical and important point. While he doesn’t mine the gap between his open-ended question about Wine 2.0 potentially being no more complex than a new set of technologies for wineries to communicate and a larger view of Wine 2.0 being a social networking revolution, certainly Wine.com makes the current point for him.
In order for Wine 2.0 to mean anything beyond “point” solutions and one-off customer communities, no more advanced then bulletin boards, one of the pillars from the very earliest stages of the Internet, somebody has to build a bridge to sustainable, leading, cutting-edge wine commerce. Somebody has to knock Wine.com off their perch.
I hope we rise to the occasion.
Good Grape Update 06/06/07: My previous assertion that Wine.com doesn’t follow Web 2.0 practices wasn’t entirely correct. A couple of good folks from Wine.com have updated me and they do offer RSS Feeds. I always fact-check myself to make sure these sorts of corrections aren’t necessary, but in this case they are right. Thanks, as well, to the guys from Wine.com for being gracious about their mention.